Alas, archive.today (archive.ph, archive.is, archive.vn, etc.) is sometimes blocked in some countries, it sometimes serves CAPTCHAs, it tries to create a "fingerprint" using Javascript, and it contains a tracking pixel.
Neither Internet Archive nor Common Crawl do those things. (There are other archives I am not mentioning that do not do these things either.)
When it works, archive.today may seem like a perfect solution to "paywalls". And then it stops working. In truth most paywalls are solved by controlling HTTP headers like UA and X-forwarded-for, controlling Javascript and controlling cookies. This control requires no third party intermediary (middleman) like Archive.today. Or Internet Archive, for that matter.
None of these archives are perfect and it's true the public could use more of them. But there are better ways to avoid "paywalls" which are just a means of collecting data about non-subscribers while deliberately annoying them with Javascript.
The Internet Archive is significantly less useful because they allow people to exclude their public social media accounts or websites. On a couple occasions I have tried to find a source for old deleted statements using the IA only to find that the data had been scrubbed. Fortunately archive.today still had a copy in one case, but in the other one I was out of luck.
What were you looking for that was prone to scrubbing? Just curious because I have a collection of historical data to go through and don't know what to expect
The Internet Archive operates within the law (mostly), while archive.foo is blatantly illegal, which is why it has so many domain names, among other things. Think Anna's Archive vs Library of Congress.
The future is going to be some kind of bland corporate internet of useless corporate things (only people with a team of lawyers can afford to operate any service on this dark-forest light-network), paired with some kind of dark web full of very useful uncorporate things, which corporations are constantly trying to hunt down, which everyone will use every day.
It most certainly does not. The archive is home to petabytes of pirated content, and Jason Scott himself has told people many times on many different platforms/interviews to intentionally upload copyrighted content, because "if we had to police everything, we would have no content... so upload first, then let the rightsholder deal with requesting takedowns".
All you have to do is click on the "software" link at the top of the page, and you can find just about any copyrighted app or game that has ever been released, on any platform, available to download instantly for free. Besides usenet, it's the largest centralized cache of pirated content on the planet.
It's one thing to claim Section 230 because you are a service provider and you don't control what your users upload, but it's entirely another thing to publicly acknowledge that you're aware that people do it, you encourage them to do it, AND you don't care.
And regarding archive.foo, just because they have many domains doesn't make it illegal... it means they have enemies who are guilty of the Streisand Effect. Enemies who are known to attack registrars, DNS providers, upstream ISPs/hosting providers and anyone else who will entertain a false flag attempt at claiming a ToS violation in order to get a site taken offline.
The Internet Archive does turn a blind eye when it comes to pro-actively moderating uploads, but they're not required to do that. They do follow takedown requests as the law proscribes (including taking down lots of stuff that is legal and really shouldn't be taken down, because the takedown laws have no exceptions for it).
The Internet Archive tries to push boundaries sometimes - all corporations do. IA having a link to "software" and then not pro-actively moderating that section is like Uber not getting medallions for its taxi driver employees who it calls contractors. It's not the same as the flagrant disobedience from archive.today. IA did flagrantly disobey one time, and it almost catastrophically deleted them from existence, to the detriment of everyone.
Or stop talking about them. No but seriously I always wonder how other sites or workaround get taken down, but nobody cares about archive. I just hope it continues to stay under the radar.
The dirty secret is that the news media needs archive.today in order to function. Anyone writing an article about subject Y needs to know what every paper wrote about it. Back in the 00's it got out that you could log into almost any newspaper web site with "media/media", something that got clamped down on when it got out.
You'd think The New York Times could afford to get a subscription to other newspapers for their reporters but there is no way they could stoop so low as to admit that they're dependent on or equal to them in in any way. Most smaller papers are such marginal operations that they couldn't afford it even for writers who are on the paywall. It's more ramshackle than you think since even a lot of New York Times articles are written by freelancers who have no real connection with the organization and it's even more true for all the papers that are hanging on a shoestring.
If archive.today didn't exist they'd have to make one.
Most newsrooms have access to LexisNexis or a similar service, so they have access to other paper's stories. My old newsroom also directly paid for subscriptions to other newspapers, it's not uncommon.
Bit of a hassle, though? My college had access to a ton of publications through this or that subscription, and it was so, so much more simple to just hit up z-lib or whatever, especially when away from the library.
We all hate adverts, some of us don't like or can't pay. Those who pay, have access to a few publications they enjoy. It would be absurd to pay for all the publications, all the streaming services, but we don't want monopolies either. What could be a solution for this madness?
The basic idea is that you as a user can also participate in the ads bidding, and if you wins, the ad space will be replaced by a static image. To the website owner this is revenue neutral.
I'm not sure why it was discontinued. I still have fond memories of this service.
Most likely reason why it'd be discontinued is that it makes rest of the ads less valuable; so to speak.
People who can afford to & are willing to pay for something like this; tend to also be the type of people advertisers want to actually target: disposable income, willing to spend etc.
So instead of contributing to authors, you need to altruistically donate a large proportion of your money to Google in exchange for replacing a single kind of advert? Unlike some other Google products I can very easily see why this was discontinued...
You're paying for websites by viewing their ads. You're paying with unsubstantial things like attention (and bandwidth), which through Google and other Ad providers gets converted to cash for the website.
Google Contributor offered you to pay cash directly, instead of attention. The website owner gets some of that cash, same as they would if you were shown an ad.
Well, if the revenue remains the same for the author, and it also doesn't decrease for Google, it is implied that their margin will have to also be paid by the person who donates, for else the calculation will not work.
If you're in the United States, your local public library will have newspaper and magazine subscriptions, both digital and print. If your local library doesn't have what you want, you can check larger libraries in your state to see if you qualify for a library card.
Some libraries offer non-resident library cards for a fee (e.g. $50 annually for the New Orleans Public Library).
Your library will also have a wide variety of other media in its catalog, like books, DVDs, Blu-Rays, CDs, video games, maybe even art. If they don't have a piece of physical media that you want, you can request it via interlibrary loan.
It's astounding how radical the public library system is, and it exists to solve the problem you've identified.
I want RSS with micropayments. I want to consume information in my own interface, and am willing to pay. I am not willing to pay for a full subscription to a publication when I only find a few articles a year that I want to read.
I want Spotify for text, but with a business model that makes sense for all involved.
Does somebody remember the service Flattr from a decade ago? You’d set a fixed amount to pay every month. Like a subscription.
Then, this amount got distributed between the sites you visited. If you only visited one site, they would get everything. 2 different websites = 50% each. And so on. This way there were no surprises in your monthly spending. I still see this as a pretty ideal model.
There's that new thing CloudFlare has that lets you set a price for A.I. crawlers, maybe that could be used to set a price for anybody. If the price was reasonable at all I'd have my crawler pay it for maybe 300 articles a week.
If it was trivial for me to spend 5 cents for a one off article that someone recommended me, I probably wouldn't mind it at all. Payment processor fees make that essentially impossible, requiring more thought and investment in systems like Flattr to group together the small payments.
We need to decouple online payment infrastructure from the duopoly/oligopoly of private corporations that control how and when users can exchange money online.
What if it’s not so cheap, though? I think the problem is that the ad-tech industry offers publishers more than the median reader will pay, and does so reliably, while all of the alternatives mean they have to convince a whole ton of people who’ve been trained their entire lives that the internet is free to start paying non-trivial sums for previously free content.
I would like to live in a world where we do pay for what we use but I’m not sure how we get there by now.
Maybe you wouldn't mind, but nevertheless, it has been tried and didn't work. Here's how it went for Blendle, which had the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The Economist, Time, and more on board. It wasn't payment processors that killed it.
They haven't been tried plenty of times, what are you talking about? It's been discussed since the dawn of the Internet and the ideas been around since forever, but actual attempts have been very limited in scope. The rails are there though, they're just not user friendly (http://micropayments.fyi).
How about tasteful magazine-style ads interspersed in-between the article's text and meticulously inserted in a way that not even does not harm the UX/design but contributes to it. You know, like it used to be on printed media? Only in the case of the web, the ads must not be taking up most of the web page (like full-page magazine/newspaper ads), and definitely not the entire above-fold part of it.
And most importantly, the notion of paying for ads based on tracking impressions and/or any other ways of tracking users needs to die. Cue laughter from the ad-tech majority on this site.
Yes, I am adamant that advertisement contracts must not involve profiling/client-side tracking the end users and their browsers in any way. Ad agencies and news site companies/sites/what have you must work out between them (and possibly a third party) the expected amount of users that are going to see the ad and decide on price based on that, without any client-side tracking.
Well, I dunno what goals you have, but my goals include paying for the content I read and not paying for the content I don't. This is something I already do. Paying multiple parties for access to content isn't some maddening problem where the masses are crying out for a solution. Perhaps I'm utterly missing the point in this thread?
That's well and good, but I don't mean your goals for yourself. I'm asking what our goals are (or what they ought to be) for how people broadly interact with creative works which are easily copyable.
Spotify is actively hostile to artists who intend to use it for income.
Spotify allocates a finite pool of funds to be paid out to artists. Spotify pays the artists whose work they host in proportion to the percentage of the platform's streams which that work generates.
E.G., say Spotify's users streamed 10B songs in 2024. If Taylor Swift is responsible for 1B (10%) of those streams, she would be paid 10% of Spotify's artist fund for 2024.
Recently, Spotify has attracted attention for promoting "ghost music" created en masse by in-house producers. this is done with particular intensity in non-vocal music styles, like ambient and jazz. See [The Ghosts in the Machine by Liz Pelly for Harper's Magazine](https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...) for more details on this.
Spotify stuffs their promoted playlists with this music, and tunes their automated recommendation features to prioritize this music.
This has the dual effect of (1) inflating the number of streams on the platform, and (2) algorithmically crushing the possibility of discovery. This means Spotify cannot be used effectively for promotion (obviously excluding the top .01% most popular artists), and whatever traffic an artist is able to drive to Spotify is devalued.
A decade ago, I was really interested in the idea of using a crypto like what Doge was at the time for this specific use case. Back then, a dogecoin was a fraction of a cent so it was a better fit than its current valuations.
Any individual page impression is only worth a few cents to the publisher anyway. I still think there's a lot of potential value in something similar as infrastructure for facilitating ultra-microtransactions on that scale that don't get completely consumed by credit card processors, etc.
I'm not going to maintain subscriptions to every news source out there, but I'd be more than happy to toss something in the tip jar from a fund I could top-up on a regular basis.
The fact that they chose to tie it to and advertise it as "get paid to see ads" is a significant turn-off in my mind even if the rest of the ecosystem theoretically works in functionally the same way.
In my mind, the entire point is to get away from advertising as a revenue stream entirely. I want to pay for the things I consume. If the advertising market has decided that my page impression is worth less than pocket change, I'd far rather just give that money to the publisher directly and avoid ads being part of the equation.
The core idea behind BAT isn't bad, but the marketing is pretty terrible if you're targeting people like me.
I think it is bad because it legitimizes bad practices of the marketing industry. "How bad could grabbing as much data from the population really be? We're sharing our profits!"
I like that idea. If you opened an article you wanted to read, you could be prompted to pay a few cents. You click "yes", funds are transferred, and you read the article.
In one of his books about intellectual property law, Lawrence Lessig quoted an unnamed French lawmaker as saying, "There are two things Americans need to understand about art: art has nothing to do with money, and the artist must be paid!"
I would be fine with ads if I could block anything that wasn't a simple static image with an obvious link that's off to the side. The software equivalent of what newspaper ads used to be.
Anything with sound or motion, or popups, or interrupts my reading or viewing, or something that notably worsens my user experience, or basically any usage of dark patterns . . . I will block with impunity.
Most news outlets publish basically the same information and only the arrangement and commentary are different. Sometimes they'll even brazenly report on other reporting, paraphrasing enough of the original article that you don't really need to read it anymore.
So one subscription can be enough. Maybe get two at a time if you don't know yet which is best and need a direct comparison.
You're sort of leaving out the fact that ABP launched its own ad network and advertisers had to pay them to get listed as 'acceptable.' It torpedoed their trustworthiness in the eyes of many.
Also, ABP made the setting silently opt-out instead of asking the users. That, and their new diametrically-opposite incentive of whitelisting ads for money made me bail from them.
If at least they had made an easy to use panel to opt-in which kinds of ads you were OK with (Text ads, static images, animated images, silent videos, etc.), it would have helped their case a lot.
I'm fine with this approach as long as it goes both ways. The media organisation's server is theirs, and if they want to put up a paywall or block clients with ad blockers, that's their prerogative.
At no point does ublock force their server to perform work it wouldn't otherwise. “Blocking clients with ad blockers” isn't a thing, there is only “send information plus instructions for the client to block itself”, and “only send information to logged in users” (and if they're incapable of choosing trustworthy users, that is not my problem).
I didn't say anything about the server doing extra work? And server-side ad insertion definitely exists, but if you want to get pedantic about the delivery mechanism, that's fine, websites have the right to bundle their content with ads and code that makes their ads more difficult to block.
You have a problem. You want to figure out a way to get people to pay for things like news, investigative reporting, art, community and positive externalities.
It's one space where I think some form of microtransaction (in the sub-cents USD) could work: I want to pay per article, not have yet another subscription in the 5-15 USD just because an article interested me.
Media consumption habits changed a lot in the Internet-era, we read articles from many different publications, and only very few of those are of interest enough for someone to spend that amount per month. Instead having a pre-paid system I could top up for paying out per read would be very attractive to me to get rid of a paywall.
I just don't want more subscriptions, we really reached saturation with this model...
Media consumption habits changed because that's how the internet was foisted on people - not necesarily because anybody made a choice or were asked what their preferences were.
After 30 years on the internet, I've gone full circle. I don't want (and won't) pay per article. 99% of the news articles I read come from a handful of trusted websites (a couple of major news outlets, a couple of local news outlets, etc.) and I don't have any problem subscribing to them. There's too much garbage on the internet, and I want the gatekeeping.
I guess that puts sites like HN in an awkward position, though. Some of the content posted here is interesting, but rarely enough that I would pay to read it on some random site. If it's important enough, it'll show up on one of the news sites I pay for.
I've gone full circle and not even internet content, I now subscribe to a few physical magazine and enjoy the act of reading them on paper, it's a very different experience than on a screen.
Similarly to my journey through ebooks back when Kindle launched, got very into it for a while but got tired of not being able to share interesting reads with friends, ended up buying physical copies of ebooks I really liked, and in the end just ditched ebooks to have only physical books on my bookshelves.
Which leaves me in this weird position on the internet, I would like to pay for some of the articles I read from publications I respect but have no need nor will to subscribe to online.
I don't subscribe (with payment) even to websites I trust for their content because I don't trust them for how they track users, and how users are (or could be) tracked everywhere by payment processors via those subscriptions.
Subscribing to a public library where diversity of content is guaranteed but tracking is not per user is fine.
It's a good question, and I can at least say something positive about every solution.
Ads let you make money long before you're big enough to compel subscriptions... but they basically make the least tech savvy people subsidize the rest of us which isn't fair.
Paywalls on everything seems fair, but it means that only some people will see things that everyone should read. Like a critical bit of investigative journalism.
Paywall + free articles per IP address (common solution) is almost good, but it requires every single content producer to polish the system, and IP address isn't the ideal fingerprint. Requiring everyone to quickly register (like Apple sign-in) seems decent, but once again now everyone has to polish this system. Though until you're big you could just use substack/wordpress/whatever.
Bundle subscriptions like Apple News is a decent solution—one of the few times I've paid for news—, but secures the domination for incumbents large enough to appear on Apple News. It doesn't answer the question for anyone else.
Microtransactions seem like they'd be a good way to throw some scraps to even tiny sites you visit once. But I think there's too much psychological overhead that isn't even worth the pennies. Like when you had to click the +1 Flattr button back in the day, even though it was a tiny donation, you'd still find yourself thinking if it was really worth it. Hmm I only read half the article, etc.
I'd partake in a microtransaction system that pays based on the percentage of the article I finished. Some assurance of high-quality journalism would be helpful.
If HN existed as pay-to-play for instance (it probably wouldn't), I wouldn't be opposed to paying based on my usage for the curation - knowing that I'm supporting the creators/authors of the content I'm enjoying. I don't think an unlimited plan makes sense - instead pay per article. I think the amount you pay per should be chosen when you create your account, not every time you open an article. I think this is most fair to the creators and consumers with the least organizational bloat.
They will eventually start pushing ads. Just like Netflix, Amazon prime, etc… Paying a subscription to prevent ads is like paying a ransom: maybe you get lucky and they don’t come back for more in the future. But most all businesses seek growth, forever, so you probably end up with a low tier of a multi-tier subscription offering with ads and increasingly poor quality and costs that go up unexpectedly year on year.
> Paywalls on everything seems fair, but it means that only some people will see things that everyone should read.
The thing is that was status quo for a long time, the paywall being either you sitting down at a restaurant/barber/some other business that already bought papers, or you buying the paper yourself. And this was a worse arrangement for newspapers; distribution costs for a physical paper are catastrophically high compared to web hosting.
I think the major issue is two-fold:
1) Papers early adoption of the Internet, putting all their content online for free, was ridiculous and unsustainable from minute one. While this is our cultural expectation, that does not mean it is remotely good business and continuing to indulge the consumer that this can be free, for even one or three or whatever arbitrary amount of articles you're willing to "give away" each month is doing nothing but devaluing your product further.
2) In conjunction with the above, if papers are to charge for their reporting again, the quality needs to go up substantially. I don't recall the last time I read an article on even a mainstream, big news organization, and didn't find just like... completely avoidable issues. Typos. Poor grammar. Lack of cited sources or even just outright incorrect information. The pace of news must be allowed to slow because good product takes time to make, and being first if your reporting is shit needs to be derided more directly.
To put it short: News needs to be comfortable to take time to dig into issues, not simply be in a mad rush to cover everything first no matter how shitty the cited information is, and it has to be ready to stand behind a paywall and just... be real with people. If you want quality news, you need to be willing to pay for it, full stop.
The only other solution I can picture is independent news organizations that are funded by the taxpayer but not beholden to the government, as an American looking at my own government right now... I mean I think it's likelier we'll cure all forms of cancer by Thursday.
Well yeah, sortof. Note that the credit card companies mostly function as tech providers for the actual banks, who get a bunch more of the money.
And there are a bunch of fixed costs that emerge in running payment networks at scale (mostly related to fraud and disputes), so micropayments are a hard sell.
Possible that someone could try again with stablecoins but I'm still sceptical it would work. Like, I'd pay for it but I already pay for a bunch of newspapers monthly.
The business model is broken, and, arguably, so too is the business environment--there's many angles from which it appears capitalism is no longer serving the public good. If we replaced it with another -ism, what might it be, and how might that support information and knowledge for the public good?
Obviously the solution is embedded video ads that float over top content that play with sound enabled by default and tiny little x button about 3 pixels wide and 50% transparent in one of the corners /s
The real answer is that we need a universal web currency, and a tracker that pays web pages on view.
There would be 2 webs. A free web, and a paid web. The paid web would set a cost per page and if you wanted to view the page you would pay the cost.
No more month to month flat fee, if you watch non-stop videos, you pay non-stop video prices.
No more unlimited anything on the paid web, but the trade off would be that there are no more ads.
Of course, the paid web would hate the existence of the free web and spend untold fortunes to destroy it, as any time you can get something for free instead of paying for it is a potential loss of income for them.
> No more unlimited anything on the paid web, but the trade off would be that there are no more ads.
The assumption that publishers wouldn't double, or triple dip is absurd. If you've read any recent magazine you'll notice half of it is advertisement. You'd essentially end up with a paid web _and_ ads.
In the last 10 years or so companies and news outlets stared gravitating towards subscription based business model but people can't or don't want to subscribe to multiple different services(subscription fatigue). My prediction is that a lot of subscription based services will collapse and get replaced by microtransactions unless you offer something exceptional like Netflix, Spotify or World of Warcraft.
Since the dawn of a more commercial internet (80's?) this has been pointed out as the holy grail, for example to replace ads and newspaper subscriptions. So how do you think this could now materialize? In general I think individual financial transactions are getting more expensive, making micro payments even more unlikely then ever before.
Most media outlets these days are just a pile of dark patterns.
My local newspaper charges $1/4-weeks for N months, then rockets to $30/4-weeks after (and it still has ads and an absurd number of trackers!). There are 13 4-week spans in a year, rather than the usual 12 months everyone else prices on.
If you try to cancel online they give you repeat offers to temporarily lower the price back to $4/mo (until recently you couldn't cancel online at all).
If they just charged $5/mo forever and removed ads for it, I'd probably subscribe perpetually... but instead I don't even bother with their nonsense and use a combination of archive.is and reader mode to steal it. I can get 1/3 of their content online free anyway from AP News directly.
I don't have the context to comment on the interpersonal skills of the media outlet. If the price is $30 after the introductory price, then the price is $30. You disagreeing with the price or their sales tactic doesn't entitle you to steal their content.
Then just say you're a thief, no need to pretend there is any other issue than you are OK with stealing when you deem a companies practices to be disagreeable to your own.
I think the biggest issue is the _vast_ majority of news is noise. It won't effect you. Maybe you could argue we should be "aware" of certain events happening but I'd argue most only complicate your life.
I would subscribe to a local news provider but I see no reason to ever subscribe to a national news outlet.
wasi_master said this the last time this project was posted -
"Hello everyone, it's the author here. I initially created 13ft as a proof of concept, simply to test whether the idea would work. I never anticipated it would gain this much traction or become as popular as it has. I'm thrilled that so many of you have found it useful, and I'm truly grateful for all the support.
Regarding the limitations of this approach, I'm fully aware that it isn't perfect, and it was never intended to be. It was just a quick experiment to see if the concept was feasible—and it seems that, at least sometimes, it is. Thank you all for the continued support."
I am curious why these workarounds continue to work .
If the content owners care so much about the paywall integrity they can verify if it is really google bot . Google provides a reverse dns lookup of the IP addresses of their bots[1]
You're painting 'media' with a broad brush. I have multiple local sources that report on local issues and are critical of the local establishment. A lack of funding is causing local news sources to go out of business.
I use this all the time and it does work very well. You do have to update it (manually) on occasion though, sometimes it can break things if you don't.
The problem is there's not really a good way to subscribe to these things. I'd gladly pay a nominal fee (~$6 USD/mo) for access to media, but I'm not about to subscribe individually to each site. Ideally, I'd subscribe to a single service and payment is split across the various sites in proportion to how many articles I read from each site.
There was a service that promised this a while back, but IIRC mozilla bought and killed it.
This. I trialed Apple News+ so I could read WSJ, Atlantic, New Yorker on my iPad via the native iOS app and immediately dropped my subscription when I started seeing ads sandwiched within the articles. Ridiculous.
Thanks for making this known. On the face of it, it’s a good deal. First party slick app with ad-free good quality news content, with a nominal fee. If you pay the Apple premium, they’ll give you the best possible experience and not clutter your screen with ads, right? Guess not.
> I'd gladly pay a nominal fee (~6/mo) for access to media, but I'm not about to subscribe individually to each site. Ideally, I'd subscribe to a single service and payment is split across the various sites in proportion to how many articles I read from each site.
How many sites would you end up splitting that across? For people who click a lot of links on Hacker News or other social media that could be a dozen or more, easily. Depending on your clicking patterns that could descend into sub-$1 amounts
Meanwhile sites like the New York Times charge $25/month and don’t have to split it with anyone.
I think all of the micropayment or pass-type ideas suffer from the same problem: The dollar amounts people imagine paying are an order of magnitude less than what sites are already charging their customers. There’s a secondary problem where many of the people (not you specifically, just in general) who claim they’d pay for such a pass would move the goalposts as soon as it was available: Either it’s too expensive, they just don’t feel like paying it, or they come up with another justification to continue using paywall bypasses instead of paying anything.
Upper-end estimates for typical web traffic CPC/CPM rates are around 10¢ per click and 0.5¢ per impression. I never click on ads, but let's hypothesize that with very-well targeted ads 5% of people click through. That ends up at around an estimated 1¢ per page view. Even at 5x that rate, I'd be able to read 1000 articles ($5 USD) before even approaching the $6 USD/mo rate I think is reasonable.
That's over 30 articles per day, again at a 5x rate than advertising will return. Will there users that read vastly more than that? Sure. But there's also many readers that will under-utilize the service too.
Just take a look at how YouTube Premium is doing, many creators report that their premium revenue vastly outpaces ad-supported viewers on a per-view basis.
If the revenue doesn't make sense, then you could supplement the revenue with ads for users who exceed a soft cap, or have tiered subscriptions. Something like a basic (1k articles per month)ad-supported subscription for $4, basic ad-free for $6, and unlimited ad-free for $10.
Yes? If they show me one page per year, they can get a few cents per year. That's how it works. If they want more money, they should produce more content worth viewing.
NYT is a good example though - I will not pay for a subscription, since I really don't consume it that much. But I would LOVE to pay for an article / a podcast here and there. Let me pay 50c for this one article and I'd gladly pay for it. Unfortunately this doesn't fit the subscription model and publishers are too afraid (I assume) to offer this additional model since there are a lot of subscribers also paying the full subscription fee and not using the service a lot (just like me).
Like Spotify and how big name artists/record labels shaft all the individual content creators when it comes to revenue sharing. I do pay for Spotify regardless, I would pay about the same for the written equivalent. Not sure if that would be enough to sustain any real investigative journalism though
Check if your local library has a PressReader subscription. It doesn't help open links to paywalled articles, but depending on your library, you may already have access to a lot of newspapers and magazines.
That's surprising because Googlebot publishes IP ranges for its crawlers and it's fairly simple to block fake crawlers these days (super easy through Cloudflare, for example).
In my experience 12ft.io was pretty much useless after a honeymoon period of a few months when it first came out so I wouldn't be surprised. The Googlebot method used to work with almost everything but at some point major news orgs caught on in quick succession and I gave up even bothering to try it.
Which is something that shouldn't work. Google used to require sites to show the same thing to Googlebot and normal users; cloaking used to be banned. Were Google still enforcing that rule, these sites would have been removed from its index.
Serious question: How do we expect reporters and journalists to be funded if nobody pays?
I'm reading a book about the Watergate scandal, "All the president's men", and one thing I keep wondering is how these journalists would get paid today in the absence of newspaper revenue.
Paywalls are annoying but good journalism isn't free...
Exactly. Why this is such a difficult concept to grasp? They create a product, set a price, you choose to subscribe or not. If you created licensed software and someone pirated it, are you agreeable to that?
If you created software and sold a license for it, and I pirated it, would that be acceptable? They create a product, set the price, you choose to pay or not.
It's a bit different in practice with media. You can hear/read/see it anywhere. You can read someone's newspaper in the public transport or listen to a song in a cafeteria or watch something at your friend's house. Yes, somebody paid for it anyway, but there's no way to control the following spread of it.
It's debatable in every aspect. Internet - is partly public, so it's not something they couldn't expect - that somebody will try to read their articles avoiding the paywall. I personally support on a monthly basis the media that I definitely want to exist. The others... well, they also probably have their audience. I don;t know the economy of the whole thing, but probably in the end everyone gets their audience/support group.
> "It's debatable in every aspect"
-- A business creates a product. They offer the product to consumers for a price. If you take the product without paying, you are stealing. Seems straightforward to me.
If it’s a tool or something similar, yeah. Information is something you have very limited control over in public space. I guess it’s more a question of the business model rather than considering this stealing or not. The whole art domain is based on stealing and recycling.
If this News Media Alliance put some effort into enabling per-article micropayments or a prepaid credits system valid across all its members, there'd be fewer people looking to bypass paywalls.
https://archive.ph/
We need to keep making more of these.
This article was archived 4 days ago. :-)
https://archive.ph/dSeku
A slightly different take - archive only the text, like "reader mode"
https://github.com/carterworks/yazzy
https://web.archive.org
https://commoncrawl.org
I would prefer more of these.
Alas, archive.today (archive.ph, archive.is, archive.vn, etc.) is sometimes blocked in some countries, it sometimes serves CAPTCHAs, it tries to create a "fingerprint" using Javascript, and it contains a tracking pixel.
Neither Internet Archive nor Common Crawl do those things. (There are other archives I am not mentioning that do not do these things either.)
When it works, archive.today may seem like a perfect solution to "paywalls". And then it stops working. In truth most paywalls are solved by controlling HTTP headers like UA and X-forwarded-for, controlling Javascript and controlling cookies. This control requires no third party intermediary (middleman) like Archive.today. Or Internet Archive, for that matter.
None of these archives are perfect and it's true the public could use more of them. But there are better ways to avoid "paywalls" which are just a means of collecting data about non-subscribers while deliberately annoying them with Javascript.
The Internet Archive is significantly less useful because they allow people to exclude their public social media accounts or websites. On a couple occasions I have tried to find a source for old deleted statements using the IA only to find that the data had been scrubbed. Fortunately archive.today still had a copy in one case, but in the other one I was out of luck.
What were you looking for that was prone to scrubbing? Just curious because I have a collection of historical data to go through and don't know what to expect
In one case it was a personal website, the other was a Twitter account. Both got scrubbed from the IA.
Apparently they will comply with GDPR and DMCA requests, I'm not sure what precise mechanism was used in those cases.
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/eut3na/can_i_get_p...
https://www.joshualowcock.com/guide/how-to-delete-your-site-...
The Internet Archive operates within the law (mostly), while archive.foo is blatantly illegal, which is why it has so many domain names, among other things. Think Anna's Archive vs Library of Congress.
The future is going to be some kind of bland corporate internet of useless corporate things (only people with a team of lawyers can afford to operate any service on this dark-forest light-network), paired with some kind of dark web full of very useful uncorporate things, which corporations are constantly trying to hunt down, which everyone will use every day.
> The Internet Archive operates within the law
It most certainly does not. The archive is home to petabytes of pirated content, and Jason Scott himself has told people many times on many different platforms/interviews to intentionally upload copyrighted content, because "if we had to police everything, we would have no content... so upload first, then let the rightsholder deal with requesting takedowns".
All you have to do is click on the "software" link at the top of the page, and you can find just about any copyrighted app or game that has ever been released, on any platform, available to download instantly for free. Besides usenet, it's the largest centralized cache of pirated content on the planet.
It's one thing to claim Section 230 because you are a service provider and you don't control what your users upload, but it's entirely another thing to publicly acknowledge that you're aware that people do it, you encourage them to do it, AND you don't care.
And regarding archive.foo, just because they have many domains doesn't make it illegal... it means they have enemies who are guilty of the Streisand Effect. Enemies who are known to attack registrars, DNS providers, upstream ISPs/hosting providers and anyone else who will entertain a false flag attempt at claiming a ToS violation in order to get a site taken offline.
The Internet Archive does turn a blind eye when it comes to pro-actively moderating uploads, but they're not required to do that. They do follow takedown requests as the law proscribes (including taking down lots of stuff that is legal and really shouldn't be taken down, because the takedown laws have no exceptions for it).
The Internet Archive tries to push boundaries sometimes - all corporations do. IA having a link to "software" and then not pro-actively moderating that section is like Uber not getting medallions for its taxi driver employees who it calls contractors. It's not the same as the flagrant disobedience from archive.today. IA did flagrantly disobey one time, and it almost catastrophically deleted them from existence, to the detriment of everyone.
Or stop talking about them. No but seriously I always wonder how other sites or workaround get taken down, but nobody cares about archive. I just hope it continues to stay under the radar.
The only long term solution is to stop sharing paywalled content.
The dirty secret is that the news media needs archive.today in order to function. Anyone writing an article about subject Y needs to know what every paper wrote about it. Back in the 00's it got out that you could log into almost any newspaper web site with "media/media", something that got clamped down on when it got out.
You'd think The New York Times could afford to get a subscription to other newspapers for their reporters but there is no way they could stoop so low as to admit that they're dependent on or equal to them in in any way. Most smaller papers are such marginal operations that they couldn't afford it even for writers who are on the paywall. It's more ramshackle than you think since even a lot of New York Times articles are written by freelancers who have no real connection with the organization and it's even more true for all the papers that are hanging on a shoestring.
If archive.today didn't exist they'd have to make one.
Most newsrooms have access to LexisNexis or a similar service, so they have access to other paper's stories. My old newsroom also directly paid for subscriptions to other newspapers, it's not uncommon.
Bit of a hassle, though? My college had access to a ton of publications through this or that subscription, and it was so, so much more simple to just hit up z-lib or whatever, especially when away from the library.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37009598
Russians will have to make one
https://archive.today/gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today...
Or create a deeper underground where the masses do not get involved?
There’s no real way to tell if the content you share today will be paywalled tomorrow.
Screenshot FTW!
We all hate adverts, some of us don't like or can't pay. Those who pay, have access to a few publications they enjoy. It would be absurd to pay for all the publications, all the streaming services, but we don't want monopolies either. What could be a solution for this madness?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor
The basic idea is that you as a user can also participate in the ads bidding, and if you wins, the ad space will be replaced by a static image. To the website owner this is revenue neutral.
I'm not sure why it was discontinued. I still have fond memories of this service.
Most likely reason why it'd be discontinued is that it makes rest of the ads less valuable; so to speak.
People who can afford to & are willing to pay for something like this; tend to also be the type of people advertisers want to actually target: disposable income, willing to spend etc.
So instead of contributing to authors, you need to altruistically donate a large proportion of your money to Google in exchange for replacing a single kind of advert? Unlike some other Google products I can very easily see why this was discontinued...
You're paying for websites by viewing their ads. You're paying with unsubstantial things like attention (and bandwidth), which through Google and other Ad providers gets converted to cash for the website.
Google Contributor offered you to pay cash directly, instead of attention. The website owner gets some of that cash, same as they would if you were shown an ad.
"Large portion"? I don't think it says that.
Well, if the revenue remains the same for the author, and it also doesn't decrease for Google, it is implied that their margin will have to also be paid by the person who donates, for else the calculation will not work.
If you're in the United States, your local public library will have newspaper and magazine subscriptions, both digital and print. If your local library doesn't have what you want, you can check larger libraries in your state to see if you qualify for a library card.
Some libraries offer non-resident library cards for a fee (e.g. $50 annually for the New Orleans Public Library).
Your library will also have a wide variety of other media in its catalog, like books, DVDs, Blu-Rays, CDs, video games, maybe even art. If they don't have a piece of physical media that you want, you can request it via interlibrary loan.
It's astounding how radical the public library system is, and it exists to solve the problem you've identified.
> It's astounding how radical the public library system is…
As a child of the 80s/90s I absolutely love how both of my generation’s uses of “radical” fit perfectly in this sentence. Well chosen.
I want RSS with micropayments. I want to consume information in my own interface, and am willing to pay. I am not willing to pay for a full subscription to a publication when I only find a few articles a year that I want to read.
I want Spotify for text, but with a business model that makes sense for all involved.
Does somebody remember the service Flattr from a decade ago? You’d set a fixed amount to pay every month. Like a subscription.
Then, this amount got distributed between the sites you visited. If you only visited one site, they would get everything. 2 different websites = 50% each. And so on. This way there were no surprises in your monthly spending. I still see this as a pretty ideal model.
There's that new thing CloudFlare has that lets you set a price for A.I. crawlers, maybe that could be used to set a price for anybody. If the price was reasonable at all I'd have my crawler pay it for maybe 300 articles a week.
Micropayments have been tried plenty of times and never succeeded. People say they'd be willing to pay, but they're not.
If it was trivial for me to spend 5 cents for a one off article that someone recommended me, I probably wouldn't mind it at all. Payment processor fees make that essentially impossible, requiring more thought and investment in systems like Flattr to group together the small payments.
We need to decouple online payment infrastructure from the duopoly/oligopoly of private corporations that control how and when users can exchange money online.
What if it’s not so cheap, though? I think the problem is that the ad-tech industry offers publishers more than the median reader will pay, and does so reliably, while all of the alternatives mean they have to convince a whole ton of people who’ve been trained their entire lives that the internet is free to start paying non-trivial sums for previously free content.
I would like to live in a world where we do pay for what we use but I’m not sure how we get there by now.
Maybe you wouldn't mind, but nevertheless, it has been tried and didn't work. Here's how it went for Blendle, which had the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The Economist, Time, and more on board. It wasn't payment processors that killed it.
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/08/the-poster-child-for-micro...
Is it really about people not being willing to pay though?
I hadn't even heard of Blendle, had I heard that it was a thing and had the mentioned publishers I would've used it.
I've visited those sites so many times and I've never even seen a mention of Blendle.
They haven't been tried plenty of times, what are you talking about? It's been discussed since the dawn of the Internet and the ideas been around since forever, but actual attempts have been very limited in scope. The rails are there though, they're just not user friendly (http://micropayments.fyi).
Unfortunately you aren't willing to pay enough.
Micro payments for journalism don't work
How about tasteful magazine-style ads interspersed in-between the article's text and meticulously inserted in a way that not even does not harm the UX/design but contributes to it. You know, like it used to be on printed media? Only in the case of the web, the ads must not be taking up most of the web page (like full-page magazine/newspaper ads), and definitely not the entire above-fold part of it.
And most importantly, the notion of paying for ads based on tracking impressions and/or any other ways of tracking users needs to die. Cue laughter from the ad-tech majority on this site.
Yes, I am adamant that advertisement contracts must not involve profiling/client-side tracking the end users and their browsers in any way. Ad agencies and news site companies/sites/what have you must work out between them (and possibly a third party) the expected amount of users that are going to see the ad and decide on price based on that, without any client-side tracking.
The solution is comfort in going without.
The fun and innovation of circumvention will never get old. There is no comfort to be had in stagnation.
Note that this, like ad blocking or piracy, also doesn’t help fund the creators.
If you’re indeed “going without” you have no obligation to fund the creators?
Is the goal to fund more creators, or just to have fewer people with a supposed obligation to fund creators?
Well, I dunno what goals you have, but my goals include paying for the content I read and not paying for the content I don't. This is something I already do. Paying multiple parties for access to content isn't some maddening problem where the masses are crying out for a solution. Perhaps I'm utterly missing the point in this thread?
That's well and good, but I don't mean your goals for yourself. I'm asking what our goals are (or what they ought to be) for how people broadly interact with creative works which are easily copyable.
I'd vote we build a spotify for new subscription where you get a share for views
spotify isn't sustainable as a primary income source for ~99% of artists on it
Spotify is actively hostile to artists who intend to use it for income.
Spotify allocates a finite pool of funds to be paid out to artists. Spotify pays the artists whose work they host in proportion to the percentage of the platform's streams which that work generates.
E.G., say Spotify's users streamed 10B songs in 2024. If Taylor Swift is responsible for 1B (10%) of those streams, she would be paid 10% of Spotify's artist fund for 2024.
Recently, Spotify has attracted attention for promoting "ghost music" created en masse by in-house producers. this is done with particular intensity in non-vocal music styles, like ambient and jazz. See [The Ghosts in the Machine by Liz Pelly for Harper's Magazine](https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...) for more details on this.
Spotify stuffs their promoted playlists with this music, and tunes their automated recommendation features to prioritize this music.
This has the dual effect of (1) inflating the number of streams on the platform, and (2) algorithmically crushing the possibility of discovery. This means Spotify cannot be used effectively for promotion (obviously excluding the top .01% most popular artists), and whatever traffic an artist is able to drive to Spotify is devalued.
A decade ago, I was really interested in the idea of using a crypto like what Doge was at the time for this specific use case. Back then, a dogecoin was a fraction of a cent so it was a better fit than its current valuations.
Any individual page impression is only worth a few cents to the publisher anyway. I still think there's a lot of potential value in something similar as infrastructure for facilitating ultra-microtransactions on that scale that don't get completely consumed by credit card processors, etc.
I'm not going to maintain subscriptions to every news source out there, but I'd be more than happy to toss something in the tip jar from a fund I could top-up on a regular basis.
That's what the Basic Attention Token (BAT) from the Brave team tried (is still trying?) to do: https://brave.com/brave-rewards/
Kinda?
The fact that they chose to tie it to and advertise it as "get paid to see ads" is a significant turn-off in my mind even if the rest of the ecosystem theoretically works in functionally the same way.
In my mind, the entire point is to get away from advertising as a revenue stream entirely. I want to pay for the things I consume. If the advertising market has decided that my page impression is worth less than pocket change, I'd far rather just give that money to the publisher directly and avoid ads being part of the equation.
The core idea behind BAT isn't bad, but the marketing is pretty terrible if you're targeting people like me.
> The core idea behind BAT isn't bad
I think it is bad because it legitimizes bad practices of the marketing industry. "How bad could grabbing as much data from the population really be? We're sharing our profits!"
I like that idea. If you opened an article you wanted to read, you could be prompted to pay a few cents. You click "yes", funds are transferred, and you read the article.
this creates massive incentives for clickbait
No....because you would get to see preview of the article and if you trust the news outlet and the author, you would do it.
In one of his books about intellectual property law, Lawrence Lessig quoted an unnamed French lawmaker as saying, "There are two things Americans need to understand about art: art has nothing to do with money, and the artist must be paid!"
Scroll ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scroll_(web_service) ) was attempting to solve this exact issue.
I don't see the problem. Pay for the ones that you find valuable and ignore the rest.
Nobody needs, or is entitled to, everything.
> Nobody needs, or is entitled to, everything.
Not even the publishers! But they sure feel entitled.
I would be fine with ads if I could block anything that wasn't a simple static image with an obvious link that's off to the side. The software equivalent of what newspaper ads used to be.
Anything with sound or motion, or popups, or interrupts my reading or viewing, or something that notably worsens my user experience, or basically any usage of dark patterns . . . I will block with impunity.
Most news outlets publish basically the same information and only the arrangement and commentary are different. Sometimes they'll even brazenly report on other reporting, paraphrasing enough of the original article that you don't really need to read it anymore.
So one subscription can be enough. Maybe get two at a time if you don't know yet which is best and need a direct comparison.
I just check reuters and apnews first these days to see what's going on before checking localized stuff.
I think something like Apple News (one subscription, many publications) is the best thing we’re likely to get in our current market conditions.
In an ideal world, 10-25¢/article access fees, charged in a clear and uniform way, would probably be the most fair.
ABP, the original uBlock Origin, saw the writing on the wall a decade ago or whenever and tried to mediate a truce between users and advertisers.
ABP would allow through ads that weren't egregious, and users could provide compensation for content they consumed.
People however either can't read or can't comprehend the writing on the wall, so instead they rioted against ABP and moved to uBlock Origin.
I know there are so many bad and greedy things that companies do. And we also talk about them a lot.
But we almost never talk about how greedy the end users are. And you cannot solve problems without understanding the full problem.
You're sort of leaving out the fact that ABP launched its own ad network and advertisers had to pay them to get listed as 'acceptable.' It torpedoed their trustworthiness in the eyes of many.
Also, ABP made the setting silently opt-out instead of asking the users. That, and their new diametrically-opposite incentive of whitelisting ads for money made me bail from them.
If at least they had made an easy to use panel to opt-in which kinds of ads you were OK with (Text ads, static images, animated images, silent videos, etc.), it would have helped their case a lot.
My computer belongs to me and will display the things I tell it to display. If ABP gets in the way of that, then so long ABP.
This is essentially a variant of tragedy of commons by this point.
I'm fine with this approach as long as it goes both ways. The media organisation's server is theirs, and if they want to put up a paywall or block clients with ad blockers, that's their prerogative.
At no point does ublock force their server to perform work it wouldn't otherwise. “Blocking clients with ad blockers” isn't a thing, there is only “send information plus instructions for the client to block itself”, and “only send information to logged in users” (and if they're incapable of choosing trustworthy users, that is not my problem).
I didn't say anything about the server doing extra work? And server-side ad insertion definitely exists, but if you want to get pedantic about the delivery mechanism, that's fine, websites have the right to bundle their content with ads and code that makes their ads more difficult to block.
Except its a bit like that PERL quote.
You have a problem. You want to figure out a way to get people to pay for things like news, investigative reporting, art, community and positive externalities.
You think, I know, i'll use ads!
Now you have two problems.
"Greedy end users"? WTF.
It's one space where I think some form of microtransaction (in the sub-cents USD) could work: I want to pay per article, not have yet another subscription in the 5-15 USD just because an article interested me.
Media consumption habits changed a lot in the Internet-era, we read articles from many different publications, and only very few of those are of interest enough for someone to spend that amount per month. Instead having a pre-paid system I could top up for paying out per read would be very attractive to me to get rid of a paywall.
I just don't want more subscriptions, we really reached saturation with this model...
I think that argument is begging the question.
Media consumption habits changed because that's how the internet was foisted on people - not necesarily because anybody made a choice or were asked what their preferences were.
After 30 years on the internet, I've gone full circle. I don't want (and won't) pay per article. 99% of the news articles I read come from a handful of trusted websites (a couple of major news outlets, a couple of local news outlets, etc.) and I don't have any problem subscribing to them. There's too much garbage on the internet, and I want the gatekeeping.
I guess that puts sites like HN in an awkward position, though. Some of the content posted here is interesting, but rarely enough that I would pay to read it on some random site. If it's important enough, it'll show up on one of the news sites I pay for.
I've gone full circle and not even internet content, I now subscribe to a few physical magazine and enjoy the act of reading them on paper, it's a very different experience than on a screen.
Similarly to my journey through ebooks back when Kindle launched, got very into it for a while but got tired of not being able to share interesting reads with friends, ended up buying physical copies of ebooks I really liked, and in the end just ditched ebooks to have only physical books on my bookshelves.
Which leaves me in this weird position on the internet, I would like to pay for some of the articles I read from publications I respect but have no need nor will to subscribe to online.
I don't subscribe (with payment) even to websites I trust for their content because I don't trust them for how they track users, and how users are (or could be) tracked everywhere by payment processors via those subscriptions.
Subscribing to a public library where diversity of content is guaranteed but tracking is not per user is fine.
It's a good question, and I can at least say something positive about every solution.
Ads let you make money long before you're big enough to compel subscriptions... but they basically make the least tech savvy people subsidize the rest of us which isn't fair.
Paywalls on everything seems fair, but it means that only some people will see things that everyone should read. Like a critical bit of investigative journalism.
Paywall + free articles per IP address (common solution) is almost good, but it requires every single content producer to polish the system, and IP address isn't the ideal fingerprint. Requiring everyone to quickly register (like Apple sign-in) seems decent, but once again now everyone has to polish this system. Though until you're big you could just use substack/wordpress/whatever.
Bundle subscriptions like Apple News is a decent solution—one of the few times I've paid for news—, but secures the domination for incumbents large enough to appear on Apple News. It doesn't answer the question for anyone else.
Microtransactions seem like they'd be a good way to throw some scraps to even tiny sites you visit once. But I think there's too much psychological overhead that isn't even worth the pennies. Like when you had to click the +1 Flattr button back in the day, even though it was a tiny donation, you'd still find yourself thinking if it was really worth it. Hmm I only read half the article, etc.
I'd partake in a microtransaction system that pays based on the percentage of the article I finished. Some assurance of high-quality journalism would be helpful. If HN existed as pay-to-play for instance (it probably wouldn't), I wouldn't be opposed to paying based on my usage for the curation - knowing that I'm supporting the creators/authors of the content I'm enjoying. I don't think an unlimited plan makes sense - instead pay per article. I think the amount you pay per should be chosen when you create your account, not every time you open an article. I think this is most fair to the creators and consumers with the least organizational bloat.
“subscriptions like Apple News”
They will eventually start pushing ads. Just like Netflix, Amazon prime, etc… Paying a subscription to prevent ads is like paying a ransom: maybe you get lucky and they don’t come back for more in the future. But most all businesses seek growth, forever, so you probably end up with a low tier of a multi-tier subscription offering with ads and increasingly poor quality and costs that go up unexpectedly year on year.
> Paywalls on everything seems fair, but it means that only some people will see things that everyone should read.
The thing is that was status quo for a long time, the paywall being either you sitting down at a restaurant/barber/some other business that already bought papers, or you buying the paper yourself. And this was a worse arrangement for newspapers; distribution costs for a physical paper are catastrophically high compared to web hosting.
I think the major issue is two-fold:
1) Papers early adoption of the Internet, putting all their content online for free, was ridiculous and unsustainable from minute one. While this is our cultural expectation, that does not mean it is remotely good business and continuing to indulge the consumer that this can be free, for even one or three or whatever arbitrary amount of articles you're willing to "give away" each month is doing nothing but devaluing your product further.
2) In conjunction with the above, if papers are to charge for their reporting again, the quality needs to go up substantially. I don't recall the last time I read an article on even a mainstream, big news organization, and didn't find just like... completely avoidable issues. Typos. Poor grammar. Lack of cited sources or even just outright incorrect information. The pace of news must be allowed to slow because good product takes time to make, and being first if your reporting is shit needs to be derided more directly.
To put it short: News needs to be comfortable to take time to dig into issues, not simply be in a mad rush to cover everything first no matter how shitty the cited information is, and it has to be ready to stand behind a paywall and just... be real with people. If you want quality news, you need to be willing to pay for it, full stop.
The only other solution I can picture is independent news organizations that are funded by the taxpayer but not beholden to the government, as an American looking at my own government right now... I mean I think it's likelier we'll cure all forms of cancer by Thursday.
I feel like the major credit card companies really missed the boat with micropayments.
Well yeah, sortof. Note that the credit card companies mostly function as tech providers for the actual banks, who get a bunch more of the money.
And there are a bunch of fixed costs that emerge in running payment networks at scale (mostly related to fraud and disputes), so micropayments are a hard sell.
Possible that someone could try again with stablecoins but I'm still sceptical it would work. Like, I'd pay for it but I already pay for a bunch of newspapers monthly.
The business model is broken, and, arguably, so too is the business environment--there's many angles from which it appears capitalism is no longer serving the public good. If we replaced it with another -ism, what might it be, and how might that support information and knowledge for the public good?
Obviously the solution is embedded video ads that float over top content that play with sound enabled by default and tiny little x button about 3 pixels wide and 50% transparent in one of the corners /s
Those of us old enough to remember newspapers hated when they did that.
Or, wait…
Just make the button work on the 3rd click, and count the other 2 as ad clicks.
The real answer is that we need a universal web currency, and a tracker that pays web pages on view.
There would be 2 webs. A free web, and a paid web. The paid web would set a cost per page and if you wanted to view the page you would pay the cost.
No more month to month flat fee, if you watch non-stop videos, you pay non-stop video prices.
No more unlimited anything on the paid web, but the trade off would be that there are no more ads.
Of course, the paid web would hate the existence of the free web and spend untold fortunes to destroy it, as any time you can get something for free instead of paying for it is a potential loss of income for them.
> No more unlimited anything on the paid web, but the trade off would be that there are no more ads.
The assumption that publishers wouldn't double, or triple dip is absurd. If you've read any recent magazine you'll notice half of it is advertisement. You'd essentially end up with a paid web _and_ ads.
Ok, I guess I won't read content from News Media Alliance outlets. I think they are probably fine with that.
I think about Steam a lot -- piracy goes down tremendously when it's easier and better to just not pirate games.
In the last 10 years or so companies and news outlets stared gravitating towards subscription based business model but people can't or don't want to subscribe to multiple different services(subscription fatigue). My prediction is that a lot of subscription based services will collapse and get replaced by microtransactions unless you offer something exceptional like Netflix, Spotify or World of Warcraft.
Edit: Microtransactions as in micropayments.
> replaced by microtransactions
I assume you mean micro payments?
Since the dawn of a more commercial internet (80's?) this has been pointed out as the holy grail, for example to replace ads and newspaper subscriptions. So how do you think this could now materialize? In general I think individual financial transactions are getting more expensive, making micro payments even more unlikely then ever before.
Yea, micropayments but people can't keep up with dozens subscriptions. Someone will figure out micropayments sooner or later.
I mean, Jakob Nielsen has been advocating for them since last century: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-case-for-micropayments/
He was ahead of his time.
Most media outlets these days are just a pile of dark patterns.
My local newspaper charges $1/4-weeks for N months, then rockets to $30/4-weeks after (and it still has ads and an absurd number of trackers!). There are 13 4-week spans in a year, rather than the usual 12 months everyone else prices on.
If you try to cancel online they give you repeat offers to temporarily lower the price back to $4/mo (until recently you couldn't cancel online at all).
If they just charged $5/mo forever and removed ads for it, I'd probably subscribe perpetually... but instead I don't even bother with their nonsense and use a combination of archive.is and reader mode to steal it. I can get 1/3 of their content online free anyway from AP News directly.
Do you think they have to raise their subscription prices because many people are stealing the content?
If they thought that they wouldn't be begging me to pay $4 instead of $30 whenever I try to cancel.
I wonder if they've ever attempted to calculate the cost of being incredibly unpleasant as a service.
I don't have the context to comment on the interpersonal skills of the media outlet. If the price is $30 after the introductory price, then the price is $30. You disagreeing with the price or their sales tactic doesn't entitle you to steal their content.
I don't need to be entitled, I can just do it. Call the police, no one cares.
Then just say you're a thief, no need to pretend there is any other issue than you are OK with stealing when you deem a companies practices to be disagreeable to your own.
I think the biggest issue is the _vast_ majority of news is noise. It won't effect you. Maybe you could argue we should be "aware" of certain events happening but I'd argue most only complicate your life.
I would subscribe to a local news provider but I see no reason to ever subscribe to a national news outlet.
As a journalist, I think you're absolutely right, I've met lots of people who clearly won't benefit from reading the news.
https://github.com/wasi-master/13ft
wasi_master said this the last time this project was posted -
"Hello everyone, it's the author here. I initially created 13ft as a proof of concept, simply to test whether the idea would work. I never anticipated it would gain this much traction or become as popular as it has. I'm thrilled that so many of you have found it useful, and I'm truly grateful for all the support.
Regarding the limitations of this approach, I'm fully aware that it isn't perfect, and it was never intended to be. It was just a quick experiment to see if the concept was feasible—and it seems that, at least sometimes, it is. Thank you all for the continued support."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41294067
Probably don't spend too much time getting this running, folks.
It can't be that easy, can it? Doesn't google bot have known ip ranges that publishers whitelist?
It's not. In my experience they even completely block non-end-user IP ranges, and I'm not fond of being raided due to running this at home.
Not me jumping to the link only to realize I already have it stared ;)
Great work.
Fabulous naming choice.
I am curious why these workarounds continue to work .
If the content owners care so much about the paywall integrity they can verify if it is really google bot . Google provides a reverse dns lookup of the IP addresses of their bots[1]
[1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
Small discussion (29 points, 4 days ago, 6 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44601344
I would understand if media were actually working - reporting on local issues, exposing corruption or where things are not working for residents.
Reality is that current media are mouthpieces of the rich designed to make us act against our own interest and help widen the wealth gap.
These media companies are parasites.
You're painting 'media' with a broad brush. I have multiple local sources that report on local issues and are critical of the local establishment. A lack of funding is causing local news sources to go out of business.
Bypass Paywalls Clean extension [1] still working and getting updates [2].
[1] https://gitflic.ru/user/magnolia1234
[2] https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-fire...
I use this all the time and it does work very well. You do have to update it (manually) on occasion though, sometimes it can break things if you don't.
These dont work for me, the browser refuses to install them.
"Error Manifest file is missing or unreadable Could not load manifest."
Streisand amplification in effect.
I'm not paying for subscriptions. I'll pay per article or not at all.
The problem is there's not really a good way to subscribe to these things. I'd gladly pay a nominal fee (~$6 USD/mo) for access to media, but I'm not about to subscribe individually to each site. Ideally, I'd subscribe to a single service and payment is split across the various sites in proportion to how many articles I read from each site.
There was a service that promised this a while back, but IIRC mozilla bought and killed it.
There's Apple News. They choose what you have access to, of course.
They serve you adverts even if you pay, so that disqualifies them for me.
This. I trialed Apple News+ so I could read WSJ, Atlantic, New Yorker on my iPad via the native iOS app and immediately dropped my subscription when I started seeing ads sandwiched within the articles. Ridiculous.
Thanks for making this known. On the face of it, it’s a good deal. First party slick app with ad-free good quality news content, with a nominal fee. If you pay the Apple premium, they’ll give you the best possible experience and not clutter your screen with ads, right? Guess not.
Interesting--that hasn't been my experience. I have a _lot_ of filtering layers; one or more of them might be catching those.
> I'd gladly pay a nominal fee (~6/mo) for access to media, but I'm not about to subscribe individually to each site. Ideally, I'd subscribe to a single service and payment is split across the various sites in proportion to how many articles I read from each site.
How many sites would you end up splitting that across? For people who click a lot of links on Hacker News or other social media that could be a dozen or more, easily. Depending on your clicking patterns that could descend into sub-$1 amounts
Meanwhile sites like the New York Times charge $25/month and don’t have to split it with anyone.
I think all of the micropayment or pass-type ideas suffer from the same problem: The dollar amounts people imagine paying are an order of magnitude less than what sites are already charging their customers. There’s a secondary problem where many of the people (not you specifically, just in general) who claim they’d pay for such a pass would move the goalposts as soon as it was available: Either it’s too expensive, they just don’t feel like paying it, or they come up with another justification to continue using paywall bypasses instead of paying anything.
Upper-end estimates for typical web traffic CPC/CPM rates are around 10¢ per click and 0.5¢ per impression. I never click on ads, but let's hypothesize that with very-well targeted ads 5% of people click through. That ends up at around an estimated 1¢ per page view. Even at 5x that rate, I'd be able to read 1000 articles ($5 USD) before even approaching the $6 USD/mo rate I think is reasonable.
That's over 30 articles per day, again at a 5x rate than advertising will return. Will there users that read vastly more than that? Sure. But there's also many readers that will under-utilize the service too.
Just take a look at how YouTube Premium is doing, many creators report that their premium revenue vastly outpaces ad-supported viewers on a per-view basis.
If the revenue doesn't make sense, then you could supplement the revenue with ads for users who exceed a soft cap, or have tiered subscriptions. Something like a basic (1k articles per month)ad-supported subscription for $4, basic ad-free for $6, and unlimited ad-free for $10.
Yes? If they show me one page per year, they can get a few cents per year. That's how it works. If they want more money, they should produce more content worth viewing.
NYT is a good example though - I will not pay for a subscription, since I really don't consume it that much. But I would LOVE to pay for an article / a podcast here and there. Let me pay 50c for this one article and I'd gladly pay for it. Unfortunately this doesn't fit the subscription model and publishers are too afraid (I assume) to offer this additional model since there are a lot of subscribers also paying the full subscription fee and not using the service a lot (just like me).
Like Spotify and how big name artists/record labels shaft all the individual content creators when it comes to revenue sharing. I do pay for Spotify regardless, I would pay about the same for the written equivalent. Not sure if that would be enough to sustain any real investigative journalism though
> How many sites would you end up splitting that across?
For news? Two, I guess.
My newspaper used to have two sources: local news from their local reporters, and then AP stuff.
It hadn't worked for a long time.
Check if your local library has a PressReader subscription. It doesn't help open links to paywalled articles, but depending on your library, you may already have access to a lot of newspapers and magazines.
Was it ever publicly communicated how 12ft or archive.ph|is work? Or is it something they keep to themselves ?
I think (in the case of 12ft) they were just impersonating Googlebot.
That's surprising because Googlebot publishes IP ranges for its crawlers and it's fairly simple to block fake crawlers these days (super easy through Cloudflare, for example).
doesn't google also run some "undercover" bots to verify that you don't serve very different versions of your website to users vs bots ?
In my experience 12ft.io was pretty much useless after a honeymoon period of a few months when it first came out so I wouldn't be surprised. The Googlebot method used to work with almost everything but at some point major news orgs caught on in quick succession and I gave up even bothering to try it.
this shouldn't work due to reverse DNS checks
> they were just impersonating Googlebot.
Which is something that shouldn't work. Google used to require sites to show the same thing to Googlebot and normal users; cloaking used to be banned. Were Google still enforcing that rule, these sites would have been removed from its index.
Serious question: How do we expect reporters and journalists to be funded if nobody pays?
I'm reading a book about the Watergate scandal, "All the president's men", and one thing I keep wondering is how these journalists would get paid today in the absence of newspaper revenue.
Paywalls are annoying but good journalism isn't free...
Exactly. Why this is such a difficult concept to grasp? They create a product, set a price, you choose to subscribe or not. If you created licensed software and someone pirated it, are you agreeable to that?
Piracy is the reality of life. You can't really "turn if off", so as a company you have to plan with that in mind.
Bringing up morality or whatever is a complete non sequitur.
Not sure how is this illegal. It’s like saying that listening to a song that is played anywhere, but your paid service is illegal.
Anything public and online is accesible. These guys just motivated a bunch of other people to build more tools to fuck with paywalls.
If you created software and sold a license for it, and I pirated it, would that be acceptable? They create a product, set the price, you choose to pay or not.
It's a bit different in practice with media. You can hear/read/see it anywhere. You can read someone's newspaper in the public transport or listen to a song in a cafeteria or watch something at your friend's house. Yes, somebody paid for it anyway, but there's no way to control the following spread of it.
Sure, if you hear or see something in a public space, but don't you agree that deliberately bypassing their means of protecting their IP is theft?
It's debatable in every aspect. Internet - is partly public, so it's not something they couldn't expect - that somebody will try to read their articles avoiding the paywall. I personally support on a monthly basis the media that I definitely want to exist. The others... well, they also probably have their audience. I don;t know the economy of the whole thing, but probably in the end everyone gets their audience/support group.
> "It's debatable in every aspect" -- A business creates a product. They offer the product to consumers for a price. If you take the product without paying, you are stealing. Seems straightforward to me.
If it’s a tool or something similar, yeah. Information is something you have very limited control over in public space. I guess it’s more a question of the business model rather than considering this stealing or not. The whole art domain is based on stealing and recycling.
If this News Media Alliance put some effort into enabling per-article micropayments or a prepaid credits system valid across all its members, there'd be fewer people looking to bypass paywalls.
I love the phrase "purveyors of unauthorized paywall bypassing technologies". Makes them sound like a high-end, boutique winery.
Now I'm going to steal even harder from the corpos.
So you value their content but plan to continue stealing it and jeopardize their ability to remain financially solvent?
It's cringy how you are in every thread of this submission using the lamest arguments from decades ago. "Stealing" lmao.
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